According to Davis-Felner, it was member companies of the Wi-Fi Alliance that decided Wi-Fi Direct needed to be enhanced.

"We need to build on the certification program to foster the development of (multivendor) services, particularly for ... some of those key use cases that were envisioned when we initiated Wi-Fi Direct," Davis-Felner said. Those included printing, file-sharing, data synchronization and playing video games, she said.

One problem that some users have had is being alerted to the presence of a nearby Wi-Fi Direct device, such as a printer, but finding that it can't talk to their own device over Wi-Fi Direct. The hooks that vendors can use to make their products work with other Wi-Fi Direct devices haven't been well enough defined, an engineer who works with the Wi-Fi Alliance said last week. Ideally, users should see only devices that they can actually use.

To make more products work together, the Alliance plans to define a more robust services platform that will make it easier for developers to write applications that use Wi-Fi Direct, she said.

Davis-Felner emphasized that this new work will build upon the current standard and future products will be backward-compatible with earlier Wi-Fi Direct gear. No changes will be made to hardware.